Radical Theology Advent (week 2)

Second Advent Sunday of Peace

I hope you were intrigued by last weeks Advent post. You may have noticed that although this piece followed the structure of a religious service, the words were quite contrary. This is why I have entitled these liturgies, radical theology.

Introductory rights

In the spirit of reframing the liturgical season, we look to advent from a more radical perspective. In so doing, we transform the season into a time of waiting and preparing ourselves to a renewed commitment to the practice of subjectivity. To take a step back from ourselves and consider how our activities and roles contribute to our identity and meaning.

Peace Candle

On this the second Sunday of advent, we blow out the candle of peace. We do this as a decentering practice so that we may be disrupted through and through. We seek to acknowledge that peace will never reign in this crazy world. Blowing out the candle of peace represents our desire to fully understand how we tarry with the ongoing nature of conflict.

Thanks be to the tarrying

Opening prayer

May the network of the Holy Spirit move us, and may we be filled with jouissance while we wait for our peace to be disrupted. For the pleasure in the pain of suffering can be so enlightening. Let The Real, the nothing that is something, be at the center of all we do during this special time of the liturgical year.

Thanks be to The Real

Many ask, who will show us the way to peace and reconciliation? In radical theology, we strive to tarry with the ways chaos cannot be overcome. Let us consider the adventurous event of a human jumping out of an airplane. In so doing, they have the tendency to scream. As they adjust to the reality of free fall, the guttural reaction ceases. In the same way, though we must at times scream about injustice, there comes a time when we must also learn to stop. A time when we must be able to step out of the protest and sit with the injustice. For the protest is a way of avoiding the existential threat of its reality. In the life of Jesus, we find an extraordinary way of dealing with injustice. Upon Jesus’ arrest, Peter chops the ear from the head of one of the soldiers, and is rebuked. Jesus’s admonishment demonstrates that we are never to harm another. Only with the help of the network of the Holy Spirit can we find the courage to face the freefall into the injustice of that abyss.

Thanks be to the abyss.

The collect

Tonight, we come seeking chaos instead of peace. Help us find the courage to jump from the plane of our own understanding and plumet into the abyss. Help us stop our protest and allow the disruption to reveal something new. We long to be transformed by the tarrying of the chaos.

Benediction

Oh, split and divided God, thank you for meeting us here today. Help us pause and work through each day of chaos. Where the path is straight, make it crooked. There are those who experience peace away from the hustle and bustle. Those who bubble wrap and delete the world around them. But those who yearn to experience silence amongst the quickening of chaos shall be blessed. May their discipline make a channel for this abyssal armistice. Rejoice, then, and give thanks as we receive this decentering practice. May the chaos ruffle you through and through. Go ye now and jump into the abyss.